FFW07: Lessons in coupling & isolation

Setting up studio monitors is never as simple as it sounds; not if you want to get the best performance from them. After finding the right positions within the room, you've got to make sure they're properly mounted and isolated. This First Word, written sometime in 1999, discusses simple things you can do to improve the sound of your monitors by paying attention to mounting, coupling and isolation.

Lessons in coupling and isolation
“Yikes, those Questeds are making my ATCs sound bad!” I cried. Brad was somewhere behind the console, fossicking for test CDs in a dirty blue milk crate. “Ha!” he laughed, “I dare you to print that!” “No, no,” I explained, “my ATCs don’t sound right when those Questeds are sitting next to them... the low mids have gone all lumpy!”

Brad and I had just unpacked the Quested VS2108s and, noting their size, decided to sit them flush beside my ATCs for a quick and easy A/B comparison. But at 34cm wide, the Questeds’ imposing baffles were playing havoc with the dispersion of the considerably slimmer ATCs, coupling the lower frequencies and making them sound dull and ordinary.

Interesting? Not really. It’s simple physics, and it’s something that PA operators deal with whenever they stack multiple boxes side by side. But it’s been about 15 years since I stacked a PA system, and acoustic coupling was the last thing on my mind as we lined up the Questeds beside the ATCs.

Switching between the ATCs and Questeds showed that neither pair were sounding worthy of their respective price tags. Taking the Questeds off the bench returned the familiar ATC sound. Likewise, removing the ATCs and listening to the Questeds in isolation revealed a much higher level of sound quality, certainly more in line with their reputation.

Lesson #1: Never compare monitors in any kind of side-by-side situation. It may seem like a good way to make a direct A/B comparison, but all you’ll actually be testing is how badly each monitor affects the other one. Retailers, take note…

Later that week, during an AudioTechnology ‘Spontaneous Human Consumption’ event at Brad’s place, Michael Stavrou spent a critical moment listening to the Questeds, rubbed his chin for another critical moment, then said, “You got any marbles?” “Dunno,” said Brad, “take a look around.” “How about washers?” Stav asked. “Ditto…”

You can dig up all kinds of interesting stuff while fossicking around Brad’s place but his marbles and washers were too well hidden, so Stav returned with half a dozen beers. He carefully removed the top from each bottle, and placed three tops under each Quested in a triangular shape (one under each front corner, one half way across the back). The performance increase was obvious to all, and became a hot topic for the next half hour or so. Just long enough for the beers to go flat…

Lesson #2: Lifting a monitor’s bottom off the surface it rests on minimises physical contact, thereby reducing the amount of sound energy being drained out of the monitor and into the surface. This ‘draining’ of energy out of the monitor causes a decrease in performance, but it gets worse: if the surface is not sufficiently well-damped, it will re-radiate that energy back into the room, causing an even further decrease in performance.

Brad’s monitor bench is about six feet long, reasonably rigid, and supported at each end. But the Questeds have a large and squarish footprint that provides a good contact area with the bench, and they generate a lot of low frequency energy for their size. Combine these factors with their 22kg weight per box, and you’ve got a powerful source of low frequency energy with a large footprint and considerable mass pressing down onto the bench, allowing an even better draining of energy.

Interestingly, my ATCs are designed with three feet fitted in place for this very reason – and never suffered this problem when mounted on Brad’s monitor bench. But why three feet? Why not four or more?

Lesson #3: Proper monitor performance requires stability. Powerful small monitors, such as the ATCs and Questeds, really need to be held stable. If the box wobbles or rocks in any way, it causes loss of output, blurring of the stereo image and smearing of high frequency detail. JBL’s Doug Button discussed this concept, which he calls ‘inertial grounding’, in my review of JBL’s LSR32s [Vol. 1, Iss. 4.]

So why three feet? Three points defines a single plane, and therefore offers maximum stability - that’s why microphone stands, camera tripods and my favourite ‘non-rocking’ café tables are all designed to stand on three feet. (Of course, ‘tripod’ literally translates to ‘three feet’. Duh!). Increasing the number of feet beyond three increases the possibility of instability and wobbling - not a good thing for microphones, cameras, steaming hot cappuccinos or studio monitors.

While Stav’s beer bottle tops demonstrated the benefits of isolation, they were only a temporary solution. Brad has since replaced them with height-adjustable brass cones designed specifically for decoupling speakers, which are available from your local hi-fi shop. Due to the squarish footprint and weight distribution of the Questeds, he’s using four cones - one under each corner. Being height adjustable, he’s able to fine-tune them for maximum stability. His Questeds are now sounding better than ever.

So if your monitors are sitting flush on their bottoms, get some cones under them ASAP! You won’t regret it. But make sure you put the cones the right way around – which is upside down. Their large flat end connects with the bottom of your monitor, while their small pointy end connects with the surface your monitor sits on. When done correctly, your monitors will look like they’re standing on tip toes. (In fact, the first commercially available cones were called ‘Tip Toes’.)

So how do the cones work? Physically, their pointed ends provide a solid connection between the monitor and the bench, which keeps the monitor from wobbling. But their small contact area with the bench creates a very high acoustic impedance, the sort of thing that sound energy prefers not to travel through. With the weight of the monitors pressing down on them, the cones are able to firmly anchor the monitors to the bench while simultaneously providing acoustic isolation. Amazing, huh?


I first met Brad Watts during the days of AudioTechnology's miserable predecessor, Sound Australasia. I was looking for a Mac-savvy guy to write a regular Macintosh audio column, and Brad came highly recommended from the people at AudioMedia magazine. We made an appointment to meet in my office at Pacific Publications. While waiting for this 'Brad Watts' to arrive, a feral-looking bicycle courier walks through the Pacific Publications cubicle farm, dreadlocks flowing and talking into the air with some kind of assertive certainty, just like a crazy guy. He stops at the door of my office. "Simmo? I'm Brad Watts, hang on a minute mate". He then proceeds to pace in and out of my office door while finishing the phone call taking place on his hands-free kit; obviously helping someone get their Mac working again. It was the first time I'd seen someone using a hands-free kit in such a brazen and open manner. It was also the first time I ever saw Brad Watts.

Two years later Philip Spencer and I saunter out of an important meeting that secured the future of our yet-to-be-published magazine. It’s a beautiful Sydney day and we’re feeling as good as the weather, so we stop at Mo’s, the outdoor café belonging to the Museum of Sydney, for a celebratory drink. The attentive waitress is buzzing around wiping tables and keeping us well stocked with refreshments.
“By the way, my name’s Jackie. What are you guys celebrating?”
“We’ve just launched our new magazine, called AudioTechnology. It’s about sound recording equipment.”
“Really? My boyfriend writes about that kind of stuff. Maybe he could write for you…”
“What’s his name?”
“Watts is his name! Brad Watts, actually.”
“He’s in our first issue…”

Fast forward a few more years and I find myself sharing a warehouse conversion at the top of Hibernian House, Surry Hills, with newly-weds Brad and Jackie Watts. Crazy and intense days, in retrospect, littered with marine aquariums, astroturf, huge televisions and way too many fried chicken wings from the Thai takeaway down stairs. But we had a lot of fun. We both had our own studio rooms; Brad with the Quested VS2108s mentioned above (which he promptly bought after the review) and me with my ATCs. Between us, there was probably not a single piece of audio gear on the planet that we could not review the heck out of.

Brad's Mac Notes column has been a regular fixture in AudioTechnology since the first issue, along with his prolific product reviews. He's probably the smartest Mac audio guy on the planet. A year or two ago he became a full-time employee of AudioTechnology, a position he well deserved. To be honest, I don't know where the magazine would be without him...

FFW04: Preset Mentalities & The Children Of The Revolution

Presets... I've always hated them. Preset synth sounds, preset effects settings, preset templates for recording, mixing and/or mastering. They might make it easier to use stuff, but they also destroy any need to understand the tools at hand and thereby discourage original thinking, original application and, ultimately, original music. Here's First Word #04, from early 1999...

Preset Mentalities & The Children Of The Revolution
As issue three of AudioTechnology went on sale, Chris Holder and I found ourselves at Q Studios, where a beaming Richard Meucke was showing off their brand new G+ SSL console and generally looking extremely pleased with himself. After much perserverance, Q Studios – formerly Rhinoceros Recorders – had finally been restored to its former glory as one of Australia’s most prestigious tracking and mixing studios, and one of the largest facilities in the Southern Hemisphere.

So there we were, Chris, myself and a handful of local engineers, producers and studio managers, all getting the royal tour. But that wasn’t the only reason we were there. Quantegy (the tape manufacturer formerly known as Ampex) had released a brand new tape formulation – GP9 Grand Master Platinum – and were using Q Studios to introduce it to the local industry. Double whammy!

GP9 grew from Quantegy’s acquisition of the 3M company; a hybrid, if you like, with the best of Quantegy’s and 3M’s tape technologies all rolled into one reel. To demonstrate this new tape, Quantegy had collected an excellent group of musicians and enlisted Simon Leadley to do the engineering. Quantegy’s Dave Williams had devised a very clever tape splicing, biasing and switching scheme that allowed different tape formulations to be compared against each other and against the live performance without changing reels or re-aligning the recorder. Other tapes used in the comparison included Quantegy’s 499 and 456, and BASF’s 990.

In my opinion, the GP9 was clearly in a new league and undoubtedly the most high resolution and true-to-life of all the tapes, doing an especially good job of reproducing the important low mid harmonics on kick drums, bass guitars and the lower registers of male vocals. It was also a hands-down winner when recording difficult sounds like hi-hats and sibilants, and made the good old 499 and 456 formulations sound more old than good. 3M’s technologies had certainly injected new blood into Quantegy, and allowed them to go beyond what either company was capable of doing on their own. A true synergy.

Eventually, we started talking about which tape we’d prefer. “Well, they all have different tonal characters,” said Chris, “and I’d probably choose the tape that best suits the style of music I’d be recording.” “Right”, said Simon Leadley, “tape becomes just like presets…”

Oh oh, someone said the ‘P’ word. If there’s one thing I detest about recording and music technology, it’s presets. In the tape context that Simon was using, the concept of presets is absolutely acceptable. Each tape sounds noticeably different and, apart from tape speed and recording level, there are no parameters to adjust once the machine is properly aligned and calibrated. But what about synths, samplers, effects processors and digital consoles? All of these products have dozens of user-adjustable parameters, but they are not always easy to understand, and that means less sales. Rather than focusing on better user-interfaces that educate the users on what the parameters do and how to use them (e.g. Apple’s ‘Balloon Help’ system), manufacturers take the easy way out by piling in the presets. After all, you’re more likely to buy something that gives you instant results on the showroom floor…

Now, let’s be fair to the manufacturers. Their user manuals often go to great lengths explaining the fundamentals of a product and what each parameter does. But when you’ve got a pile of presets allowing you to get up and going straight away, who’s going to read the manual? And let’s be fair to presets. They do provide a great way to land in the ball park – an effect preset called ‘snare reverb’ may be a good starting place for creating a unique snare reverb to suit the mix. But how many people are using them that way? Very few, I’m afraid.

In the late ‘70s, Teac introduced the affordable tape recorders and mixers that spawned the Home Recording Revolution. I was playing with analogue synthesisers at the time, particularly Roland’s System 100M. This was a totally modular synth which required plugging in a handful of patch leads before you’d hear anything that resembled a musical sound. There were dozens of parameters, but no memories and no presets. To make a useful sound you had to understand the theory behind subtractive synthesis, and that provided a great background for understanding how different sounds worked together. For me, every new sound was a unique sonic event, hand-crafted from raw materials and never to be repeated. My goal was to create unique and individual sounds that held the listener’s interest while fitting perfectly into the mix.

Teac’s Home Recording Revolution let me carry that thinking into studio and live sound engineering situations. After choosing the right microphone, each instrument would be given its own individual EQ and effect settings, which no other sound shared, and which were designed to make it unique and interesting while also fitting into the mix. That approach has remained with me to this day. In fact, I believe it to be one of the secrets behind achieving separation and clarity in a complex mix.

Many other manufacturers spurred on the Home Recording Revolution, and, as the equipment got better, we saw the emergence of the Project Studio in the mid ‘80s. Even then, most equipment users had a background in sound manipulation and understood what all the parameters were for.

But as we approach the next millennium, even the most affordable recording and music technology has become very complex, with hundreds of powerful parameters hidden behind menus full of simple presets. There’s a new generation of users who have only ever been exposed to this kind of technology. They are not encouraged to learn what all the parameters are for, and therefore they learn nothing about the art of sound manipulation.

These are The Children Of The Revolution, and their approach to sound engineering is one of hunting and pecking – just like shopping in a supermarket. Rather than learning how to program a synth or tackling the fundamentals of equalisation and effects, this ‘preset mentality’ encourages them to step through hundreds of presets in a process of elimination, trying to find the one that best fits the application. It’s time consuming, boring, and a great detriment to the creative process. And quite often the chosen preset is, in reality, the best of a bad lot.

Some years ago I reviewed one of the first affordable digital consoles, and was rather dismayed when I scrolled through the EQ library and saw a handful of guitar EQ presets, all set up and ready to go. I’m not doubting the benefit in being able to save an EQ setting and recall it later, as there are many applications where this is very useful. But to provide a bunch of preset EQs worries me. Any professional engineer worth their salt knows there can be no such thing as the perfect guitar EQ preset, in the same way that there is no such thing as the perfect vocal microphone or the universally applicable snare reverb. It all depends on the individual instrument, how it is played, and the way it fits into the mix. One size does not fit all, nor should it! But The Children Of The Revolution know no better, and blindly reach for the ‘rock guitar’ preset. As a result, all their guitar recordings have the same tonality. While artists are striving for originality, technology is encouraging similarity. Had a listen to the charts lately?

The preset mentality is destroying creativity. In their attempts to make things simpler to use, manufacturers are inadvertantly ‘dumbing’ their users and leaving The Children Of The Revolution with no voice of their own. So please, let’s pull the art of sound engineering out of the supermarket and put it back into the studio, where it belongs. Learn what the parameters of your equipment do, and use your presets as starting points only. Your work will be better for it.


AudioTechnology #04 remains an interesting issue to me for a couple of reasons. Most notably, it contained the first instalment of Rupert's Word, a short-lived column that Rupert Neve wrote to follow his interview (in this issue he discussed harmonic distortion). It also contained my review of JBL's LSR32s - the first JBLs I ever liked, and damn fine monitoring speakers too. I was so impressed that I interviewed one of the LSR32's designers, Doug Button. What he said made sense...